Happy 40th, Internet!

Forty years ago, today the first bits of data were sent between a computer and what we today know as a router, over a data cable. One month after that the “Internet” uttered it’s first words, well, word since only the letters L and O (part of the intended LOGIN message) were sent before the system FAILed.

That was the Internet’s “big bang” that started it all. Had they not been successful on that day, would we have such an inter-connected world as we do today? The way the Internet has grown today and the multitude of things that happen we forget (or some simply just don’t know) that it’s all down to tiny little “gates” opening and closing letting through electricity or not, representing the 1’s and 0’s of the data we send and receive.

UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock explains, in the video below, what they did on September 2nd, 1969 and in the following 3 months thereafter. [via Boing Boing]